Re: Fried bread

: : : : : : Hi...can you please tell me what this means and how the term came to popularity? Thanks, Sax

: : : : : It means working in a restaurant. Not sure about when it emerged.

: : : : ".Such cheaper eating places also flourished after the Civil War and were being called 'hash houses' and 'lunch stands' by the late 1860s, 'lunch counters' by 1873, 'lunch joints' by the 1880s, 'snack bars' by 1895, and finally 'luncheonettes' by the mid 1930s. A dishwasher or kitchen helper at a cheap restaurant had been called a 'pot wrestler' as early as 1840 and a 'pot-walloper' by 1860, and a waiter or waitress was called a 'hash slinger' by 1868 and was said to 'sling hash' by 1872." From "Listening to America" by Stuart Berg Flexner (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982). Hash is "chopped food; specifically: chopped meat mixed with potatoes and browned," according to Merriam-Webster online.

: : : Around the University of California, Berkeley, a kitchen or dining room worker, at least one in a fraternity or sorority, was called a hasher, and the job was called hashing. I don't know how wide a geographic range this term had. (Pancakes, by the way, were called hotcakes in Berkeley.) Chopped food had nothing to do with hashing, of course, except incidentally, as was the case with slinging hash. SS

: : Hasher is a new one on me.
: : I once saw a map where someone had drawn the (US) geography of where the name pancake, hotcake, flapjack, griddlecake, etc, prevailed. It was all in fun, as I remember a little island of Crepe.

: I am trying to remember. We never had pancakes on White Oak Mountain, W.Va. My mother got up first and fired up the wood cookstove and made biscuits from scratch every morning. (That is, until she discovered canned biscuits.) We did have "fried bread," which is kind of like a pancake.

In making pancakes the wood stove is no impediment; the batter is the thing. It's not difficult to make from scratch, but it's time-consuming and pancake mix is nowadays pretty cheap and very convenient. But the fried bread made by ESC's mother interests me. Give us the particulars, please. I'm sure you don't just mean bread that's been fried. SS